


promise me you'll stay (beyond the sunrise)

by jeannedarc



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Horror, M/M, Seaside, Skeletons, Underage Kissing, flesh-eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-11-02 11:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20736362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: hi everyone! happy halloween! please mind the tags on this one; they're important and i hate to spoil things in advance but i also don't want anyone to be feeling some type of way by the time they're finished reading this.as always thank you toelle, my love, my heart, my sounding board -- may we never curse one another to be trapped in rotting castles and ruined relationships.also, a special thank you to maddie, my beta, my number one supporter in writing this -- you don't even go here and now you're halfway through the door.





	promise me you'll stay (beyond the sunrise)

**Author's Note:**

> hi everyone! happy halloween! please mind the tags on this one; they're important and i hate to spoil things in advance but i also don't want anyone to be feeling some type of way by the time they're finished reading this.  
as always thank you to [elle](http://archiveofourown.org/users/refugeren), my love, my heart, my sounding board -- may we never curse one another to be trapped in rotting castles and ruined relationships.  
also, a special thank you to maddie, my beta, my number one supporter in writing this -- you don't even go here and now you're halfway through the door.

Jungwoo, professional milksop and probably the most loved but mocked out of his friend group, would have liked to make several confessions before whatever haunted this castle decided to open up its enormous maw and swallow him whole. The downside to that desire, beating hard in his chest, begging his sternum to crack in order to be set free, was that there was no one to whom he could confess his sins.

Somehow, he knew this would be how things ended for him.

He crept along the aged stone walls, one palm pressed to the bricks, feeling the dusty, crumbling texture of them beneath his fingertips, waiting for something to give way. There were cobwebs wrapping themselves around the soft inside of his wrist, crawling along his skin, sending shivers down his spinal column, ‘til his legs became weak with the effort of keeping him upright. 

Something in him wanted to speak. So he started talking, his voice echoing out into the empty chambers above his head, he so sure he could hear bats rattling around that it nearly stole his voice.

“Hey, so, God? I don’t know if you’re up there,” and even his voice was tremulous; the phone in his opposite hand with its shining flashlight wasn’t providing much light, so he felt just as shaky as he sounded, “but, y’know, if you _are_ it’d be really cool if you helped me survive this.” He paused, remembering his childhood Sunday school lessons, “If you _do_ help me survive this, the benefits are that I will absolutely fight Yuta and Jaehyun for daring me to do this.” Seventeen -- a _baby_, everyone crooned when he told them, some with more malicious intent than others -- and he meant a fistfight with his entire chest. Not that he’s violent. He simply knows God is: violent, vengeful.

Beneath his light step, taken with breath held, between words, something cracked, but didn’t give way. He yelped anyway, falling back, knees having given out and leaving him belly-up, staring into the infinite blackness of a high corridor ceiling.

It hadn’t looked this dilapidated from the outside, he recalled, despair washing over him. He still had fifty-six minutes of tenure left before he won that sweet betting pool from both his friends.

“Hey, God?” he asked, and everything sounded so much louder when he was speaking it into the cavernous infinity of the ceiling above him. “Can you please help me kiss a dude when I get out of here?” He didn’t have any particular dude in mind. At least, not at first. Eventually, though, his mindscape filled with snapshot memories of his stupidly enormous crush on, of all people, Doyoung, one of his closest friends and the high school student council president. Being in charge and responsible for things, Jungwoo had realised the moment of Doyoung’s election in the student government, looked _sexy_. On certain people, anyway. “I mean, if that’s cool with you. I know your fans tend to say kissing dudes would not be cool, but I would very, very much like to kiss a dude.”

Mentally, he mapped the shape of Doyoung’s thin but pretty mouth. He wondered if Doyoung’s lips were soft, like all four of the people he’s dated since realising he liked boys and girls in or around seventh grade.

Not wanting to think of this in his hour of desperation, Jungwoo climbed to his feet.

Somewhere in the distance, though, the gentle sound of rattling, not unlike the cartoon xylophones of his childhood, called his attention. 

The entire place was not only falling to pieces, but the floor was completely covered in detritus from break-ins like the one in which he was currently participating; leftovers from parties his high school predecessors had tossed carelessly aside, empty bags and beer cans, broken liquor bottles and bongs, half-eaten snacks, used condoms, the occasional hypodermic. He couldn’t imagine what kind of ragers had been thrown here, before his time, probably before his parents’ time. He swore he could hear the echo of screams, see the memory of flashing lights etched into the walls.

He continued down the same hallway in which he’d tripped, and at some point during his journey, the phone in his hand died. His eyes did not adjust. He did not remember the way he had taken to get in.

“Alright, God,” he muttered darkly, “if that’s how you wanna play it, then that’s how we’re gonna do it, I guess.” All the confidence and bravado he’d managed to fake on his way in through the enormous double front doors had drained from him long ago; this, now, was just defeat made manifest. 

Something skittered noisily beneath his feet. Something else touched the shell of his ear, whispering and cold. Jungwoo didn’t believe in ghosts, because it was _fucking impractical_, but he sure could start in a hurry. God wasn’t doing a very good job of protecting him as far as he was concerned.

Everything here was so cold. So final. He was sure, in that moment, that he would die in here. 

As if in answer to his own lack of light, Jungwoo pulled a smashed pack of Parliaments out of his back pocket, lit it with the matches tucked into the cellophane. Just that brief moment of light gave him a glimpse of all the shit covering the floor. He didn’t even smoke, not really, it was just something for affectation, something that the kids with whom he spent time thought made him look cool, in a specifically 1950s way.

He knew the legends before he’d ever been told to sneak in. Parents told them with chastising honey mouths before most kids in the town could even walk, and didn’t think to stop until long after they’d grown up. Typical bullshit, really. He leaned against the wall heavily, uncaring as to whether or not it gave out beneath his weight, resigned to his death.

The castle (not even really a castle, just an expansive manse at the seaside of his tiny hometown) had been built a hundred and fifty years before Jungwoo’s birth. The man who had commissioned it had done so for his wife and their two children. And so it had been done, all wide windows for bright sunlight and expansive gardens and a beautiful ballroom so that he and his family could be the toast of the town.

No one could say exactly why, but the family all died fairly young. Illness, some said, worry for their own families and the people they loved creasing their brows. They’d been discovered in their beds, suspicious fingertip bruises at each of their throats, but early medical observation could tell they had not been strangled. Supernatural interference, said a small sect of people, marking themselves with the sign of the cross and sourly changing the subject.

Somewhere up ahead, the rattling went on, a chattering of teeth not unlike his own, he swept through by a chill wind that could not have possibly originated from some high-up window the likes of which he wouldn’t even see. This dungeon, pretty as it had once been, was horrifyingly cold.

Jungwoo took a drag of his cigarette, coughed as he wrapped his arms around himself, let the smoke fill his lungs even though it hurt. When he blew it out he sputtered, not choking on the smoke so much as feeling the distinct sensation of feathers dragging along the inside crook of his trembling elbow. A little noise escaped him. He pressed on, stubbing out his glowing cigarette under his foot as he went.

The hallway opened to a sort of antechamber, lined with books that had pages aged yellow, their spines never once cracked. Jungwoo was forced, in that moment, as he pulled a volume from its place on a shelf, to think about what sort of person had books but did not read them. He supposed it was some kind of vanity thing, and could relate. He always wanted people to think he was smarter than he actually was. Everyone except Doyoung, of course, who knew just how dumb he could be.

A spider skittered along the curve of his thumbnail, and nestled neatly in the join of the open book’s pages. The Picture of Dorian Gray. _Fitting,_ he thought, smashing the spider as he clapped the book closed, replaced it on the shelf. He continued on, careful of his feet, not that it mattered when every half-step there was something or another cluttering the path he tried to make. As he walked he kicked at empty beer bottles that clattered along the stone flooring, the sound echoing to the rafters.

The next room, he figured, was the ballroom. He lit another cigarette, let the match burn down until it singed his fingertips, and then dropped it with a little yelp. Terror thrilled through every nerve under his skin, until he felt himself catch fire, until his nervousness turned to something heavy and stone and burning in his chest.

“God,” he asked softly, eyes turning toward the endless ceiling as it seemed to creak out a reply to a plea not given it, “please keep me safe in here. I won’t fight anyone. I’ll be the best I’ve ever been. I’ll never read anything about demons again. I’ll never insult anyone ever again. I’ll be the best. I promise.”

Every kid in his hometown went through a phase of researching the local legend. Jungwoo had been no different. He’d posted up in front of computer screens in the fourth grade, reading up on the journals of psychics who’d infiltrated the place, same as he was doing now. They said there were supernatural forces at work. It made sense. People didn’t just suddenly die when they were perfectly healthy. They surely didn’t turn up dead from something that seemed like nothing.

The bruises at their throats didn’t have fingerprint ridges. Smooth as bone, some said.

In the distance, the rattling continued, louder and moving closer as it occurred -- a haunting and amelodic sound that reminded him of music nonetheless.

Jungwoo had always been afraid. But here he was, slightly tipsy, having a conversation with a God who probably wasn’t real, ready to make a little bit of money -- but at what cost, he was forced to ask himself, pushing open the door to the main event of the house: the ballroom.

He traipsed the ballroom floor, tripping over cracks in the marble until he fell forward, landing on and skinning his knees. The fabric of his jeans tore open. He bled freely from a wound just beneath his patella. He fixed his gaze on the lightning rivulets of black that ran through the floor. Light, dim as it was from the overcast midday that had accompanied him upon his entry into this castle, poured in sluggish and sweet from the high, miniscule windows carved into the bricks that made this house a home for something unnatural, its name unspoken for a half-century at least.

When he looked up, the sound was the loudest it had ever been, filling his ears, a waterfall cascade that seemed to occupy the entirety of the enormous ballroom. He was, inexplicably, surrounded by a dozen dancing skeletons.

Jungwoo’s cigarette, short as it had become, fell from his mouth. The cherry landed firmly against the back of his hand, right in the divot between his spread fingers. He screamed, but the skeletons around him took no notice.

They danced in a frenzied waltz, one-two-three -- Jungwoo counted the rhythm of their rattling, and it calmed him, however minute the comfort -- surrounding him first at a distance but then swirling and whirling closer. Their knees knocked together, their partners making no indication of pain. Jungwoo scanned over their skeletal heads, trying to find some escape, but the nearer to him they drew, the less possible that seemed. 

One, alone, extended its hand. Jungwoo wanted so badly to wail, to beat his fists against the wind chime rib cage until it made the noise he’d heard upon first entering the manse. But he couldn’t, fear welling up in his throat like stomach acid he’d worked hard to swallow this entire time.

He reached out to take the hand, praying to that same God that he would be able to make it out if only he danced.

Everything that came next happened all at once. There was a great and terrible clattering, and all the bones surrounding him hit the floor, that same cascade that had noisily filled the room a few minutes before, when this frantic dance had begun. Jungwoo could not determine the source of their sudden falling, but the hand he had been so ready to take fell at his feet, and he stared down at it as it started jangling, as if in protest of its own fall. Phalangeal bones, suddenly possessed by some spirit he could neither see nor feel, crawled up his naked ankles. He screamed, falling again, scrambling backward on his hands and feet, only to stumble in another pile of skeletal remains.

In his fear, Jungwoo thought he had imagined the domineering boom of a voice from the head of the staircase. “_Go to sleep,_” it commanded, and Jungwoo looked up to see…

Well, for a lack of better words, the most attractive man he’d ever seen in his life, Doyoung included. Jungwoo would be impressed if he weren’t trying to figure out how his limbs worked all over again, they were still gelatinous with the fear that had so overwhelmed him a moment ago. There was nothing logical to which he could attribute this sudden attraction, though his heart attempted to assign value nonetheless.

The bones that had surrounded him, threatened him, all collapsed into the floor beneath his feet. He was grateful, despite himself.

The imposing figure started to descend the grand staircase, dressed like something out of one of those historical films his teachers were always forcing their classes to watch. High collar with long sleeves. Tapered pants tucked into riding boots. Royal sorts of colours -- red and black, although dirty, so caked and ancient and faded that Jungwoo almost doesn’t recognise the shades in the fading light._Like something out of a Disney film,_ Jungwoo’s brain supplied to him, completely unhelpful.

“Who are you?” asked his rescuer, and even this close Jungwoo could see he was good-looking, with an entire ballroom between them. Sculpted features, long hair tucked neatly over one shoulder, a mouth that was sure to pout should Jungwoo find the right combination of words to make it do so. 

“J-Jungwoo,” he stammered in response, knees beneath him shivering all over again, not so much out of fright as the fact that he was suffering from emotional whiplash -- terrified to vaguely aroused in one breath.

“Jungwoo,” the man repeated, reaching up and carding a hand through his seemingly endless hair.

Perhaps God was really out there, answering prayers live and in real time.

“Call me Johnny,” he said, crossing the dance floor between them in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Supernatural forces at play, his elders’ voices reminded him. “It’s very nice to meet you, Jungwoo. I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

Strange. Jungwoo didn’t remember mention of anyone living here from his childhood research. Not since the first family, anyhow. But then, his brain is still mushy from the skeletons trying to dance with him.

He took a step forward, angled his chin up, met the careful scrutiny in Johnny’s gaze. “It’s nice to be rescued by you,” he states, bland, keeping the normal edge of whiny flirtation from his voice even though all he could think about is being kissed by this man, this saviour, this complete stranger who’d put skeletons to bed. His imagination, always too active from reading too many books, too many news stories, swept him up in a grand idea of Johnny lifting him out of this castle, taking him to safer ground.

Johnny smiled, all warmth, and reached out to clap a hand on Jungwoo’s shoulder. “I’m happy to do it. How long have you been in here?”

Something wicked gleamed bright and high in Johnny’s eyes. Jungwoo ignored it, telling himself it was his paranoia speaking to him, a consequence of being alone and in the dark for so long. Still, the sun was falling behind the horizon outside, if the darkness filling the ballroom is any indication. All over again, he started to shudder with the cold, robbed of the little warmth the sun had managed to provide in this room. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly, compelled to tell the truth somehow, putting responsibility on the honesty and openness held captive in Johnny’s features, in the slight curl of his mouth.

In the distance, the clattering started up again, and Jungwoo’s breath caught in his throat. “As lovely as your home is,” he told Johnny sweetly, “I think I’ve really overstayed my welcome. Is there any way you can help me get out of here?”

Johnny nodded curtly, and Jungwoo didn’t miss the flash of disappointment in his smile. “Of course.” He paused. “How long did they tell you that you needed to stay?”

Jungwoo blinked a couple of times, as if that would somehow change the interpretation of what he’d heard. “An hour and a half. But I don’t know how long I’ve been in here.” He held his phone aloft, as if to show Johnny it was dead, but got no recognition. “Died at about four. What time is it now?”

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter.” Johnny was back to congeniality, dipping his head in a bow. “I’ll take you somewhere safe, somewhere those _things_\--” his upper lip curled in a sneer as he gesticulated vaguely toward the piles of bones that lay scattered around their feet, “won’t be able to get you.” With that he started to lead the pair of them back across the broken tile, up one side of a grand double staircase, and Jungwoo struggled to keep up -- Johnny’s legs were so long, and he moved so quickly, like he had something to prove, or…

Jungwoo’s brain didn’t come up with anything accusatory. Not here, anyhow.

“How’d you know I was here on a bet?” he asked Johnny, fingers wrapping around the banister, ignoring the layers of crust and dirt and the occasional crawling critter that crept out from between the supports. 

“No one ever comes here alone unless they have to,” Johnny stated plainly, guiding them up and up and up, the stairs never seeming to find their end, one case leading into another and another and another. “It’s usually twos and threes, people daring each other. A rite of passage.” Johnny grins over his shoulder, a strand of hair catching in the collar of his shirt in a way Jungwoo almost came to think of as charming. “I think my family’s seen everyone in this entire town grow up, at least in a certain sense.”

Jungwoo had put far too much thought into growing up, being born in a sleepy seaside town, but hearing it in Johnny’s voice -- not quite an accusation, but not quite an innocent joke, either -- sent his thoughts to rippling.

Upstairs was comprised of bedrooms, bereft of usable furniture, spiderwebbed with cracks in the brick, mold creeping into the corners one would think too dark to see. It was far lighter in the decrepit top half of the house, but that didn’t mean anything. The candelabra chandeliers that hung from every ceiling creaked noisily in the draft that seeped in through the open windows, the decaying walls. Jungwoo clutched at himself, stayed a good two paces behind Johnny, and tried to think of a suitable topic of conversation.

“How old are you?” he asked, when his brain failed him, and he turned beet red at how childish he sounded to his own ears.

Johnny threw back his head and laughed. “Older than you think,” he replied mysteriously, leading into a library, closing the door behind the both of them, ignoring the noisy protest of the door’s hinges as a click announced them trapped. “I’ve been working on getting this place fixed since my family left me.”

This room put the antechamber outside the ballroom to shame. Shelves covered the walls floor to ceiling, although some of them were collapsing, their contents spilling to the water-damaged carpet beneath Jungwoo’s feet. The spines of the books -- and these _were_ cracked, Jungwoo noted, plucking one from the pile, their pages smelling faintly of old ink and mildew and infinite skin cells from every reader who’d ever touched it -- revealed titles the likes of which he’d never heard.

“How long has that been?” queried Jungwoo nervously, taking his book and going to the one opening in the otherwise infinite collection that appeared to belong to Johnny. The window, open just like the rest of them, held jagged shards of coloured glass in its frame; Jungwoo had to be careful not to lean too far out the window so he didn’t end up cutting himself open on one of them. 

“Awhile,” Johnny mumbled, coming to join him. “It’s been so long since I’ve had company.”

“You mentioned that, yeah,” Jungwoo pointed out, sardonicism curling the corners of his mouth. “Do you get down to town often?”

“Not as often as I’d like.” Johnny’s smile, however, was warm, inviting, everything that would make Jungwoo want to come back to this godforsaken house, even if it fell apart beneath him and swallowed him whole. His belly groaned for food, but he felt no hunger. Strange, he thought. He had been hungry all his life.

He stammered out his next sentence, all too aware of the eyes on him, the intensity behind them. “Are, um, are you...I mean...what kind of things do you do, up here by yourself?” All at once he’d forgotten his well-practised flirtation, honed over the years.

From somewhere beneath him, Jungwoo heard rattling, and he backed away from the window, discontent and unanswered. “Not this again,” groaned Johnny, leaning too far out the window, gripping tight to the broken frame. Jungwoo wanted to warn him, but any and all caution got caught in his throat.

“_Go to sleep,_” roared Johnny in that commanding voice of his, and Jungwoo was so awed by his power, by what he knew came next, that he fell backward into a pile of books, a cloud of dust rising up around him, catching in his rainbow-hued hair. “_Do not return to this place._”

Down the side of the spire -- and he knew it was a spire, knew the outside of this house like he knew the inside of his own head -- clattered endlessly the collapsing bones. At least this time they would not be able to take hold of him.

Jungwoo could see, even from this poor vantage point, that Johnny’s palm was bleeding, that there was probably a shard of glass embedded in his skin, but could do nothing about it. At least, not until Johnny came to check on him, stooping a bit so they were at eye level and cradling Jungwoo’s stained-red cheek with his clean, dry fingertips. Jungwoo got a look at the sea-green sticking out from the opposite hand.

“You’re like one of those characters in a book, you know,” Johnny mumbled, and reached up with those same fingertips to rearrange Jungwoo’s hair with something like affection, the sort no one else has ever given Jungwoo in his life. “What’s the word...irrefragable.”

Jungwoo swallowed, not sure how it is he came to fall so quickly, but here he was, heart thudding with equal measures terror and adoration.

He glanced down at the volume in his hand. Wuthering Heights. Ironic. He forced a laugh, but the sound of the waves crashing below the cliffside carried away the sound, and his sense of self-preservation with it.

When he looked up again, there was nothing there to mar Johnny’s pale skin, not even glass, certainly not blood. He was so certain a moment before, and now there was no evidence to support him. His bottom lip quivered and he clutched at his chest, trying to fend off the cold. “Did you get hurt, putting them to bed?” he asked quietly.

Johnny did not answer, instead swept toward the door. “You’re going to stay here for a little while. You can look through my books.” He sniffed, perhaps a bit indignant at the constant stream of questions being fed his direction. “I’m going to go check to make sure they’re _all_ asleep this time.” He stood, wire-straight, back a perfect line, and strode from the room, leaving Jungwoo alone.

Minutes passed. Jungwoo heard no sign of life. When Johnny was no longer in the room, Jungwoo held no fascination for him, and in fact began to question the few things he knew and had seen.

His phone was dead. He had no research to do here. So instead, he did the next best thing he could think of, and started rummaging through the library’s contents, looking for anything that did not appear to be one of Johnny’s covetously collected novels. In the end he found very little, but that was fine -- he knew himself to be trapped here, like the poltroon he truly was.

He curled up in a chair that threatened to splinter beneath his weight, and shifted every couple pages of the journal he had managed to uncover so as to keep that from happening. The cushion was damp, as to be expected from the sea air streaming in through the broken window. He read what he could, though the pages were starting to fall to pieces and the handwriting difficult to read.

_My family do not understand what it is I’m going through,_ it read. Boring. Jungwoo pressed on regardless, rolling his eyes all the while. _There is a neighbour boy with whom I’m taken. I cannot stop what I am doing simply to think of him, and yet it is as I am building this home for my wife and two children, the long hours spent hammering together a place for them to be happy, that I dream of his arms locked around me, his breath warm on my neck._ Nevermind. Not boring. Spicy. Jungwoo bit his lip, colour rising to his cheeks, the kind on which he couldn’t blame the alcohol so much as the fever rising in his gullet.

Whoever wrote this -- presumably the owner of the house from all that long ago -- at least had good taste. Jungwoo hadn’t kissed any dudes, but he would probably kiss this one.

It was a few pages into this stranger’s fantasy that Jungwoo heard the noise. He glanced around first, eyes wide, trying to find a source. It wasn’t the sound of bones, which at this point wouldn’t even surprise him. No, instead it was a very definitive…_chewing_.

He peered down over the edge of his book’s cover. The legs of the chair, already weak, were crawling with tiny white bugs, their wings fluttering so quickly that he was sure they glittered instead of moved, their movement coupled with that incessant gnawing.

A scream tore from him. He collapsed from his chair onto the cold stone floor. It broke under the suddenness of the movement, falling into a heap as he scrambled backwards. The journal remained clutched in his hand even as he tried to get away.

Jungwoo went for the door, and screamed again when he found it locked. “Johnny!” he cried out, beating on the wood until his skin felt raw with the effort. “Johnny, please, I’m scared!”

No answer came to him. He looked down at his one bloodied hand, disbelief running course through the entirety of his frame. He sank to his knees, and let his emotions take him wherever he was meant to go.

Minutes passed as hours. Jungwoo sat with his back to the door. Eventually that door opened and he collapsed out into the hallway, staring up blankly at the ceiling.

Johnny’s face appeared in his line of sight. “Are you alright?” He held a candle in one hand, perched at the peak of one of those candleholders with the handle, tarnished but still beautiful in its own right. He looked to be somehow dirtier than before, something dark brown streaking the beautiful planes of his face, which caught in the flickering candlelight and made him look altogether like someone haunted. All at once, Jungwoo was taken again, heart fluttering, wondering if somehow God had answered his prayers. 

But then distaste flooded the back of his throat. “You left me. I almost flung myself out of the window to get away from all the bugs.” He didn’t mention the journal he’d tucked into the back of his jeans, although something nagged at him to do as much. “Did you know there were termites in the furniture?”

“I didn’t,” confessed Johnny, breathless, “but it’s okay. It’s been more than long enough. I can show you the way out, and you can see your friends if you’d like. Tell them all about the lonely old man who lives in an abandoned castle.”

Jungwoo considered this, arms folded over his chest, the journal burning into his back pocket. He glanced out the hallway window to see twilight falling along the sea horizon, twinkling navy and periwinkle. “Maybe I can make them wait a little longer,” he offered. “Scare them, since they think I’m scared of everything.” In truth he was preoccupied by the idea of Johnny, alone in this enormous manse, his only company the rattling of bones and the crashing of waves far below the cliffside. It made Jungwoo lonesome, too.

Johnny fixed him with something like knowing, and led him down the endless stairs, one hand gripping the rotted banister, the other guiding their way with the dimly dancing light of his candle.

They stopped sooner this time than last, at a wide landing covered in thick, mildewed carpets that squelched soft under both their feet. Johnny turned a new corner, and Jungwoo followed a half-step behind, loathe to lose the light as he was so certain something would slither over his feet in the darkness. He made the way into what was most certainly a master bedroom of some kind, a well-kept one at that -- though the rest of the manor was in ruins, this place, at least, had a sense of home. There was a coat draped over a chair, and several oil lamps burning low, and an enormous stack of books that didn’t appear to want to collapse under their own age. 

Johnny flashed a smile over his shoulder. “You can rest here, if you want. I’m sorry if I scared you, not coming to check on you sooner.”

“Rest?” Jungwoo hadn’t even kissed a boy -- _a man_, he corrected himself hastily, for how could Johnny be anything but? -- but suddenly his heart was set to racing once again at the thought of sleeping beside Johnny. Though he was loath to admit it, he had made a fiction in his own head: that Johnny was the man building the house all those years ago, and Jungwoo had been the neighbour boy by whom Johnny was so taken that he considered leaving his entire family. It certainly wasn’t romantic, not by the standards of the novels Jungwoo had read in school, but he craved that validation nonetheless. “I mean, eventually my friends will get bored and go home, you know...it isn’t scary anymore if they do that…”

“Unless it is,” replied Johnny with an enigmatic smile, made all the eerier by the candlelight. He set to turning up the flames in his oil lamps. “I’ll stay in another bedroom, if you want?”

Jungwoo thought of this, and shivered, and shook his head, struggling with exhaustion in a sudden rush, so much so that the words hesitated to leave his mouth. “No, you don’t…this is your bedroom, right? I don’t want to take it from you.” He paused and in that brief silence his stomach made a horrible sound; though he felt nothing about it, he knew food was long past due. “Do you have anything to eat?”

Johnny’s smile grew. “I do. I’ll go get it for you.” With the light at the appropriate temperature he disappeared out the door, closing it but not locking it behind him. At least as far as Jungwoo could tell. He rushed to the door and checked to make sure, and breathed a sigh of relief when it swung open at his ginger touch.

Jungwoo toed out of his shoes carefully, leaving them at the foot of the bed, trying not to focus on how strange it was to wear shoes in someone else’s bedroom. He sat atop the covers, his stolen journal prodding him in the small of the back, and stared out at the cloudy, starless night, thinking of home, of what his mother might tell herself when he didn’t come home that night.

He was seventeen, going on eighteen, and it didn’t matter much to him what his mother thought. Not when there was a handsome man downstairs willing to bring him something to eat and share his bed.

Outside the cracked window, the wind whistled a mournful tune, filling Jungwoo with foreboding, though he couldn’t say exactly why. 

Johnny returned a few minutes later, finding Jungwoo still on top of the bed, his legs drawn up under him, arms wrapped around the backs of his thighs as he watched the nighttime clouds drift by. He had brought bread, and cheese, and a little bottle that may have been wine. “Are you alright?” Johnny asked softly, and Jungwoo looked upon his offerings, and nodded.

“Yeah, just starving,” he half-joked, though his stomach made the same noise.

“Good thing I’m here to save you,” Johnny answered, offering a wink that set Jungwoo to racing all over again. “Is this okay? I didn’t have a whole lot that I thought you’d be interested in...mostly just meat, and that takes awhile to cook…”

Jungwoo pretended his heart didn’t have some strange reaction at the thought of Johnny cooking for him. “No, this is fine,” he said easily, flashing a grin. “Thanks for taking such good care of me.” He took the bread -- a thick, almost-black loaf made for two people to share -- and tore it in two, offered half to Johnny. 

Johnny, though, only shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said, and sunk down next to Jungwoo, watching him eat.

_Funny,_ Jungwoo thought as he took an enormous hunk of bread into his mouth. He could have sworn he’d seen something colourful flash in Johnny’s eyes, unplaceable and only for a moment. Johnny had already uncorked the wine before his arrival, and offered it to Jungwoo.

“Is that alright?” Jungwoo asked suspiciously, all at once feeling too old and too young for the experience. Not like he hadn’t tried it. His vaguely religious upbringing had made sure of that. “I mean, I’m not going to stay here forever, I feel kinda bad taking something so fancy…”

“It’s all I have,” Johnny pointed out. “I wish I had more for you. But it doesn’t bother me a bit. There’s so much of it, down in the basement...”

“There’s a basement here?”

Johnny didn’t answer, instead reaching over to thumb a crumb from the corner of Jungwoo’s lips.

The air between them hung heavy for a long moment. Jungwoo swallowed a bite of cheese, chased it with a sip of wine that burned the inside of his mouth, but sweetly dripped down the back of his throat. Funny, he hadn’t remembered tasting anything upon eating what he had thus far, but now he was sure his tongue was covered in sand or something like that, his thirst was so great.

“Can I kiss you?” Jungwoo asked quietly. He didn’t add the silent refrain that punctuated every thought of him kissing someone.

In answer, Johnny swept down and caught Jungwoo’s lips in his own, something tender and beautiful and so fleeting that Jungwoo wished he could have a second shot. Instead he reached up with an empty hand, cupped the back of Johnny’s neck, kept them within a hair’s breadth of one another.

Suddenly, the food tasted just fine. Not that it mattered much. Jungwoo was far more interested in tasting Johnny. He burned for another kiss, telling himself one more couldn’t possibly hurt.

“Was that alright?” asked Johnny, eyebrows raising slightly, voice husky with equal parts want and concern. 

Jungwoo leaned in and kissed him again, both blissfully unaware and hyper concerned with the way Johnny’s arms wound around his waist, pulling him close. Jungwoo let himself be led again, chasing the sweetness of Johnny’s kiss with all the sincerity he contained, nipping at his lower lip and thanking the God he’d prayed to for listening to him, at least this once. 

In a moment, though, Johnny pulled away, his hands having wandered the length of Jungwoo’s back and found the journal tucked into his waistband. Jungwoo stared at it as Johnny flipped open the cover, seeming not to read the words at all. He found himself wilting under Johnny’s baleful glare, made all the more effective by the low hanging of his long hair, casting him in sharp shadow. “Is this mine?” he asked, so quietly his lips barely moved, and Jungwoo focused on them, and not in the inquietude that slowly reached his every cell and nerve. “Did you get this from that library upstairs?”

“I did,” Jungwoo admitted, not having it in him to be this horror-struck _and_ to lie. He wished only to go back a few moments, and find the beauty in a kiss once more.

Outside the window, the sea seemed to rise up, the only sound between them as Johnny stayed there, surveying the subtle changes in Jungwoo’s face as they happen beneath candlelight. Jungwoo, for his part, held his breath.

“What do you know?” Johnny asked.

“I know that whoever built this house was in love with the neighbour boy.” Jungwoo failed to elaborate, an intentional oversight on his own part.

Johnny dragged a hand over his dirt-matted forehead -- but no, how could that be dirt? Jungwood realised all at once, inching back, so that their knees no longer touched and he bumped against the headboard, which rattled gently against the wall. It broke the tension between them, and Johnny, Jungwoo could swear, looked relieved.

“Is that all?” he asked with a hollow laugh, the sort that might send a shudder up someone else’s spine, were they present to bear it witness. “That’s good, then. Did you enjoy reading it?”

Jungwoo swallowed thickly, confusion fogging him over. “Yes?” he chanced, reaching out to somehow close the gap between Johnny and himself. “Should I not have?”

Johnny just smiled some more, and the longer Jungwoo looked into the star that was Johnny, shining so brightly he might burn with it, the emptier he became. But when Johnny leaned in to claim another kiss, Jungwoo’s young heart fluttered happily, all his suspicion suddenly gone.

Whatever tension could have arisen between the two of them, Jungwoo didn’t feel it as he polished off the bread, the chunk of cheese. Johnny continued to share the wine he’d brought, and so Jungwoo drank some of that, but it was bitter, blossoming metallic over the inside of his mouth, coating his insides with a sweetness that was far too heavy to be enjoyable. They talked about nothing, really, Jungwoo recounting stories of the friends he’d left waiting in the trees just to the east of the ruined castle. Johnny listened with solemnity, though it was refreshing to see him break into a real laugh now and then.

The wine weighed on Jungwoo’s head, and eventually he settled into bed. Johnny wrapped around him, all limbs and warmth that Jungwoo had never felt, not in all the people he’d dated. Seventeen years of sleeping alone felt like a lot now he had someone to sleep beside. The journal lay abandoned on the bedside table, the cover of it lifting slightly to reveal its nicely worn pages; Jungwoo watched it flutter in the faint hint of sea breeze that wafted in the window. The motion was hypnotic, and soon enough he fell asleep in a somewhat-drunken haze.

In the middle of the night, Jungwoo was awoken by the sound of the rushing ocean. He wasn’t as accustomed to it as he probably should have been; it sounded to him like the infinite roaring of a thousand angry creatures, the names of which he didn’t know. He drew his arms around himself, and realised that somewhere along the way he had lost his shirt. He dragged fingertips down the length of his arms, each in turn, feeling the gooseflesh that had risen there.

Johnny, it need not be said, was not there. Jungwoo pulled the heavy blanket, impossibly soft in a place like this, over his shoulders and folded in on himself, and tried to imagine what being warm might feel like.

Funny, he couldn’t remember. Not while he was alone.

In the air he smelled salt, tasted the tang of it on the tip of his tongue, couldn’t get it out of his mouth. He dragged out a long-suffering sigh, but did not leave the bed, instead rolled onto his side and tried not to see anything that would frighten him.

On the wall opposite him an enormous spider was nesting, and he could have sworn he heard the distant rattling of bones. Funny how they didn’t make that awful sound whenever Johnny was here. Funny how Johnny fixed everything in a split second, screaming at skeletons.

Spurred on and still a touch drunk, albeit in a hazy and distant manner, Jungwoo plucked the journal from its space on the nightstand and flipped it open to the page he had been reading before. It continued on with descriptions of what the original owner of this house had wanted to do with the neighbour boy; at any other time Jungwoo’s chest would swell with the indecency of it all, but he skipped ahead. The last few pages were blank; he skipped back, eyes locking to the last page written. 

_I tried to take them, as I was told._

Jungwoo’s heart stopped cold in his chest. He shivered, drew the blanket further over his shoulders, nearly blocked out his source of light by which he’d been reading. The entry was almost illegible, as if written in some sort of fervour the likes of which could scarcely be explained.

_I can see him now, diving from the cliff’s edge, and though my heart breaks I was weak, torn between this mortal coil in all its impleasures and the eternity he offered me…_

_Though I craved his carnal comfort a final time, I could not do as he asked…_

Squinting against the barely-there light as it filtered through the heavy blanket, Jungwoo flipped back a couple more pages. This entry, at least, was able to be read. He scanned it, temples throbbing, limbs aching, that same fear he'd felt when he'd been alone in the darkness creeping into his bones.

He read aloud, to comfort himself, Johnny being nowhere in sight.

"I have come to find myself in something of a bind," his voice told him, someone else's words guiding his calm. "The boy with whom I have lain, whose sweet peach skin I have tasted, has asked me to be with him forever. I want to whisk him away from this wretched home, the building of which has tortured me since the project began nearly a full year ago. I cannot get it to stay together, no matter how my mortal hands try. I loathe the sea. My wife claims it to be good for her, and good for the children, but its moaning wind and crashing waves keep me from sleep. The boy has asked me to be with him forever, and my heart aches for him, my arms long to hold him, my mouth desires nothing more than to taste the sweet sea salt upon him until it is no more. I told him, when last we spoke, that I could not leave my family. This displeased him."

Jungwoo stopped reading to himself, just a moment, just to make sure he was not listened to. The cold air that filtered in through the window carried the distant, musical rattling of bones, and Jungwoo was filled with the specific dread that he was running out of time.

He glanced over his shoulder. The moon hung high, its reflection tumultuously shining against a sea that threatened a storm. Without thought he continued to read, wishing that he could leave, or that Johnny was here to bring him something, some semblance of peace in the form of strong arms around his middle.

Continuing on, he shrugged his blanket from one shoulder. "He said that if I did not leave, he would never see me again. I do not wish to do the wrong thing; I married my wife for money, but that does not leave her deserving of such a cruelty. I said I would think of it, and he smiled something sharp. I love him, I love him, I love him. He has joked before that perhaps we should just kill the family."

He stopped again. Of course there was a connection between the mysterious deaths of the father, mother and two children, and this journal. He cursed his own knowledge, the curious child he had once been sitting in front of an aged computer screen, reading town records and obituaries despite the morbidity of it all.

"She told me today that she is with child," Jungwoo told absolutely no one, and though it was someone else's story he groaned with the heaviness of it, throwing the book across the room, satisfied with the way it slid down the wall, landed open but face-down on the floor.

He lay there a long while, considering.

He jumped out of his skin when he felt the distinct sensation of feathers brushing against the side of his neck, tender as a lover's touch, whispering the way a kiss did to one's soul.

_Get out,_ something growled in his ear.

Jungwoo yelped, clambering from the bed, the blanket he'd claimed draped over his shoulders, a cape that dragged round his feet and threatened to trip him as he rushed from the open bedroom, down the stairs, through the ballroom.

Johnny was nowhere in sight. Jungwoo called his name as he ran, until his voice could no longer make a sound, rushing into this room and that -- an informal study, a room with nothing but a clawfoot tub in its absolute center and, finally, what appeared to be a kitchen.

Though he was not there at first glance, Jungwoo could feel the presence of another human being, and found his feet carrying him across the kitchen, past a magnificent dining table strewn with all sorts of trash: rotten fruit, molded cheese, ancient but empty flasks of wine. He recalled the sawdust taste of what Johnny had given him when he looked upon the decaying mess of food, and shuddered, drawing the blanket around himself tighter, in the hopes of warming against an intruding sense of cold.

The flame to which he was drawn was an open trap in the floor, its door a rotten wood crawling with those same white bugs that had ruined the furniture in the upstairs library. Jungwoo, trying to scream and having nothing left with which to do so, descended the stairs quickly, into the darkness as it washed over him, wave by wave, layer by layer, until he could see absolutely nothing.

"Hello...?" he called out, hoarse, snot running down his upper lip. "Johnny?"

There was only the soft sound of gnawing -- the bugs on the wood upstairs, multiplied by the sparing basement that stretched out around him -- that greeted him in return. "Please, Johnny, I'm so scared, please be in here..." When Jungwoo turned around he could not see the beam of candlelight, gentle as it may have been, to guide him back to the staircase whence he'd come.

Another sound met his ears. He closed his eyes, taking it in, comforted merely by the fact that he was not alone, that the source could only be that of someone eating, he being all too familiar with the auditory trappings of a meal well-consumed. "Johnny, why didn't you answer me?" And though he was breathless with exhilaration of the worst possible kind, Jungwoo was joking when he chided, a little smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "It's fine if you're eating something..."

A candle lit up in the darkness, giving Jungwoo's eyes a bit of relief as they strained against infinite shadow.

What he saw drew from him a scream he did not believe himself capable of making.

There sat Johnny, stripped of his elegant shirt, chewing on something with unceasing vigour. He spared Jungwoo only a glance before turning back to his meal. His chest was streaked with the same dirt that had covered his face when he and Jungwoo had first met; Jungwoo resisted the urge to come closer, to clean him with whatever was available, restore him to the majestic gentleman he could be.

Jungwoo stepped away, careful of the blanket's hem as it pooled near his feet, too afraid to trip down here, that he might never see home again should he take another fall.

Johnny's face, previously dirty, was streaked with fresh blood that dripped down his maw, his endless rows of razor-sharp teeth biting into something raw, seeping and sanguine. Ill-mannered and voracious, Johnny smiled, exposing maggots that crawled from flesh that stuck between his monstrous teeth. "Would you like to join me for dinner?" he asked, words only a little muffled despite the fact his mouth was full, lips seeming to stretch, endless, _monstrous_. The larvae crawled down his face in impatient, scattered lines, and further down his throat, his exposed chest. 

Jungwoo suddenly could not breathe, chest constricted with a weight he could not explain. Again, he stumbled backward, thoughts rushing and circular as he tried with all his might to find the staircase that would lead to his escape. The blanket caught round his ankles, and he danced a frenzied waltz as he tried to keep his footing, only to fail at the last possible moment. Slick stone rose up to meet him, catching him in the face; it was, he knew in some distant thing like memory, a miracle this did not knock him unconscious. With blunt nails he scrabbled at the floor beneath him, slipping on it, so grateful he could not see for he knew what would meet him were there any more light in this room.

A presence, heavy and warm and wet, settled itself atop him, pinning him to the floor as he choked out a sob, his cheek pressed to what he was sure was mildew and rot, the same fate to which he was certainly consigned. Bony fingers wrapped around his wrist, devoid of flesh but burning through layers of his own skin all the same.

"You can't leave," said Johnny's voice directly against his ear, his breath ice cold and stinking of putrefaction. "You said that last time, that you wouldn't leave if I did what you wanted. I kept you safe, Jungwoo!” Fingers pressed gentle against the bob of Jungwoo’s throat, the touch so hot he tried to scream, tried to pry himself out, tried to do anything that could possibly save him from catching fire. “I protected you from your friends, and from the castle, and the dozens of yous that have tried to leave me..."

_Last time?_ Jungwoo struggled for comprehension of even the first idea, though the fight for his body won out as he wriggled beneath Johnny. His every cell felt weakened, somehow, inexplicably wavy beneath the hold that tightened around his throat. He struck out with an elbow. The joint whizzed noisily by Johnny's ear, and Johnny, thrown off by the suddenness of the movement, rolled just slightly to the left.

Jungwoo used that momentum to turn the both of them, found himself laying atop Johnny's seething frame. The both of them gasped for air. Jungwoo, sickly, was reminded of every fantasy his imagination had given him, either here tonight or out there in the world. He drew back a fist, slammed it into Johnny's face, which was layered and layered with dried blood.

Jungwoo wondered, as his knuckles crunched into the hard socket of Johnny's eye, how many times he'd fed just as Jungwoo had seen him do here tonight. How long he’d lingered here. The house had been built over a hundred years ago -- had he fed as humans ate their meals? Had he captured partying teens like Jungwoo himself? The idea drew a sob from his cracked throat. 

"You can't hurt me," said Johnny, taking Jungwoo's hips in a lover's grip, thumbs digging into his flesh as he punched again, again, again. Johnny's teeth welled with blood, though it was no longer determinable whether or not it was his own. The bugs were spewing now from his ruined eye, staring blankly up into Jungwoo’s face even as it pried apart beneath his vigilant fist.

When he could no longer feel his hand he climbed off, barely escaping the tautness of Johnny's grasp, Jungwoo did the only thing he knew to do. He ran. The stairway out of the basement seemed longer now that he was out of breath, but he climbed on all fours nonetheless, feral, frightened. His right hand was a claw comprised entirely of pain that threatened his stability as he used it to haul his quivering body up the staircase. His scrambling was a threat to his own form, nearly toppling over the edge of the unbarred incline three times, but desperation was a hysterical motivator. Survival kept his heart pounding as he wound out of the kitchen, chased closely by Johnny, able to feel his presence.

"I caught your friends waiting for you," and the fact that he wasn't even winded set Jungwoo to shuddering all over again, arms wrapped around himself as he pushed on. "I was eating one of them when you interrupted me." His indignation seemed his only fuel.

"You weren't," Jungwoo cried, and tripped on one of those mildewed carpets, the floor rising up to meet him, catching him in the face. He rolled onto his back, unable to do much else, and when his eyes came back into focus Johnny was right there, standing over him, grin crimson and horrible.

"Please let me leave," he begged, as Johnny stooped to meet his form, hands at his shoulders, pulling him into sitting up, the gesture so tender Jungwoo nearly forgot the things he'd seen.

"You can't leave me again," Johnny murmured, and leaned in to kiss Jungwoo, who tasted bile and metal all at once. Though he was a fool for love, one for coming, Jungwoo did not think he was able to faint from a kiss, until Johnny had taken him into his arms, cradled him close. "You can't leave me again."

"Please," and Jungwoo did not even recognise the creak of his own voice as he melted into Johnny's arms, as darkness fell around him.

///

The dawn rose in time, wicked silver through a heavy fog that blanketed the ruined manse from the inside out. Jungwoo, too, rose, though he wished he did not, not if it had to happen here. His entire head was a cloud, thick and impenetrable. He glanced down at his ruined hand, which still ached with the memory of a skull cracking open beneath its careless force. His knuckles were perfectly healed, no blood nor bugs having marred his skin.

It was as if the night had never happened, and Jungwoo was ready to deny it if he could, but the evidence was there nonetheless: the sea crashing against the cliffside, the malodour of blight in the carpet that had cradled him into something similar to sleep, the breathing of the stone-cold body beside him.

Johnny was wrapped around him, snoring, still covered in blood that had dried to a sickly shade of brown, the mess streaking his forehead and cheeks the night before explained. They were on the ballroom floor, tattered and time-worn fabric bunched around them. Jungwoo stared up at the high windows, wishing that something would come in and help him escape, some mythical deus ex machina the likes of which he'd read about as a child.

"What do you see, when you see me?" he asked to no one at all. To one side, he could hear the noxious gnawing of bugs into wood, and hoped to hell that they would cause the building to collapse around them.

He had to get away.

With all the gentleness he could -- a lot, considering he hadn't slept even a moment in this monstrous hold -- Jungwoo extricated himself from between Johnny's arms.

He paused. There was something he must learn.

Breath held he tipped just slightly, freedom so close he could taste it, and pressed his throbbing ear to Johnny's chest, listening for a heartbeat that did not come.

The bones rattled the morning's call in the distance. Jungwoo knew what he must do, and it was that knowledge that kept him moving in spite of the exhaustion that threatened to take him out at any moment.

It took him far too many toddling steps to go back to the bedroom in which he and Johnny had kissed, but he made it all the same, knees threatening to give out beneath him at every point along the way. Once inside the bedroom's confines he pressed his palm to the wall, caught his breath for what felt like the first time in a full day.

This was no time for wondering; his focus was iron-clad as he snatched the journal from the ruined bed.

"Hey, God?" he asked in a whisper as he slipped back downstairs, descent easier than ascent, careful as he crept across the ballroom that he didn't rouse Johnny's body, nor his suspicion. "God, if you're out there, I promise I'll do anything you need me to do, but please never let anything like this happen to anyone ever again."

The antechamber came, and then the passageways he'd taken stupidly, leading to a secret entrance. He felt as if he'd aged a thousand years over the course of a single night, but when he stepped out through the dilapidated trap door that had led to his demise and into the sunlight, he wept, a child in a mother's embrace after too long a separation.

In his back pocket a crumpled cigarette pack still remained, its matches splayed outside its cover. He pulled them out, and after a few failed attempts struck one of the matches, pressed its burning black tip to the corner of the journal. Like all old books it went up quickly, and he dropped it to the ground for the sole purpose of watching it burn.

Behind him, the ruined manse moaned like something being put to death, and its brutal cries crawled inside him, filled with the millions of insects getting their hunger sated inside that secret door.

Again, he thought of Johnny, alone and waiting for someone who would never come. He wished he could have waited a little longer, answered the questions that plagued him -- but, he reasoned, it was easier to be safe than to be smart. If he had learned nothing else, it was this that would stay with him.

Bathed in daylight he inspected himself, the grime that clung to his body, the illness that soured his stomach. Was it all some dream? He kicked his heels like some creature trying to get something from between its toes, and flecks of dried dirt and blood removed themselves from his soles. His hand still hurt, but out here he could see he’d done no damage. 

His friends’ bicycles were all there, abandoned, but their shoe print paths were clearly marked in the soft dirt of the trail that led to the mansion. He thought back to Johnny’s promise that he had eaten them, turned to look at the castle one last time, and decided it was time for him to finally, finally get some rest.

He went home, then, the long walk enough to clear his head, any and all trace of energy left in him dissolved by the time he collapsed in his bed, face-first, ignoring his mother's calls to try and determine where he’d been all night as sleep embraced him.

“Jungwoo?” his mother called, “Yuta’s mom wants to know if you’ve seen him since last night...he didn’t come home…”

His eyelashes fluttered in response, and some bird’s feather stroked the curve of his neck as he drifted away.

///

When Jungwoo neared waking, he saw a vision of a man, long-haired and beautiful, puppeting a family of skeletons. He was a brilliant conductor, leading a silent orchestra that played to the rhythm of bones rattling, high and hollow, through a magnificent ballroom. Gold light, dewy and picturesque, streamed from the window behind the man’s head, caught the silhouette of him and sheathed him, turning him into something beautiful. 

Jungwoo, from the edge of this makeshift dance floor, watched all this, watched the seemingly infinite number of skeleton dance pairs make their way round and round, their circling wider and wilder with each rotation.

He knew all too well the memory this vision came from, and tried his best to take in as much as he could. Though he had not noticed their particulars before, their frenzied waltz distracting enough that he did not have the space to take them in, two of them were quite small. Children, one might say.

From behind him, a burning touch came, wrapped around him the way a snake might do its prey. He felt a blade, starry and impossibly sharpened, against his Adam’s apple.

Jungwoo woke with a start, a scream that ripped from his still-raw throat, and clutched at his own neck, trying to stop the blood flow he was so sure was pouring from his severed flesh. There was no wound. His palms stayed dry. He wept with the force of a thousand seas.

It took him a moment, but he screwed up his courage, and opened his eyes.

Around him was a library, stacked full of books whose spines had never been cracked and whose pages had yellowed with time.

In the distance he heard the call of what he thought might be friends, not laughing as they had the day before, but frightened. In the back of his mouth he tasted blood. "Darling," boomed a voice that poured ice-cold dread directly into Jungwoo's gut, "some of the townsfolk have come to pay you a visit."

Johnny was directly behind him, those riding boots making a hollow sound as they padded across stone floor. The echo of them in the empty room raised the hair at Jungwoo’s nape, and when Johnny came closer still, a chill settled over his bones, the finality of it making him too aware of his own reality.

On the wind was carried a chattering of bones against one another, in a hectic rhythm set to music no human could hear. This time, Jungwoo swore he could hear an entire orchestra playing them their cues.

Arms wrapped around his shoulders, hefting up to standing, and when he turned, a skeleton, its jaw dripping with blood, grinned at him something wicked with its infinite rows of razor-sharp teeth, the bugs inside its shattered eye socket crawling out in what almost seemed a greeting.

"Darling?" Jungwoo asked, tremulous, shrinking away from Johnny, eyes wide and filled with limpid tears.

"You told me you'd come back to me, before you fell from the cliff," Johnny answered easily. He held out his arms as if to take Jungwoo as his partner in a dance. “And now you have, and there is no one to keep me from you.”

Every inch of him resisted, but eventually Jungwoo joined him, and they took the steps together, a perfect synchronicity that told him he would never go home. In the distance he heard the growing and frantic cries of humans, but ignored them as the music swelled to meet them, a dramatic crescendo rising to the lyricless song of his tears.


End file.
